Post-retirement I am now retired. Although exciting and stimulating at the time, being a fulltime NHS consultant was stressful. I was at everyone’s beck and call with exponentially increasing interruptions from telephone calls, pagers (as a clinician I believed that I had to carry a pager), e-mails, and mobile phones from staff and patients that […]
Latest articles
Diagnosis before treatment (Dr Phil Welsby)
Diagnosis before treatment In the United Kingdom there is an unpredicted shortage of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). I t must have been unpredicted otherwise preventative actions would surely have occurred. So what went wrong? Traditional medical teaching is that ideally a diagnosis should precede any treatment and that a comprehensive diagnosis should comprise anatomical, functional […]
Of handedness and haircuts (By Dr P Welsby)
Had a haircut today. Noticed that (a normally right handed) barber used his left hand for scissors and trimmers and I wondered why. String instrument players use their left hand (ie non-dominant hand usually) for the intricate finger board or fret work – the standard explanation being that melodic memory is usually in the non-dominant […]
How useful is resilience for doctors? By Dr George Huntington
Last month two of my Foundation colleagues wrote an opinion piece on resilience training which brought a simmering topic to boil[1]. The article itself was an interesting take and there have been many of them recently, directly correlating with worsening working conditions within the NHS. Everywhere you look, medical media is saturated with the concept […]
Resident Burnout: Developing New Approaches to Wellness for the Millennial Mindset of Graduate Medical Learners
Bryan Pardo, MD, Heidi Allespach, PhD, Joan E. St Onge, MD, Yvonne Diaz, MD University of Miami Miller School of Medicine/Jackson Memorial Hospital Millennials (born between 1984-2004) view the world in a radically different manner than do their Baby Boomer and Gen X faculty. It can be argued that a leading contributor to burnout is […]
Sexual harassment has also not been addressed in Japan
Japanese society in general has recently supported policies against sexual harassment. Many hospitals have introduced local committees for preventing or managing this issue and physicians may have been introduced to more appropriate behaviors about sexual harassment. We conducted longitudinal surveys for Japanese physicians using clinical scenarios about challenges to professionalism, including sexual harassment with multiple […]
“But what if you get made to go to war?”
Chris Yates “But what if you get made to go to war?” This must be the most prevalent initial response I get from my NHS colleagues on hearing that I juggle being both a junior doctor and an army reservist. It is a question that I have honed my response to over the last year […]
The importance of caste!
Dr Sagarika Kamath Assistant Professor Manipal University, India Dr Rajesh Kamath Assistant Professor Manipal University, India As young doctors being trained in hospital and health administration, we had a class in Organisational behaviour where the professor began saying that caste was a very important factor in any organisation. It was important for the caste to […]
A collection of thoughts from Colorado Springs to mind
Philip D Welsby Retired Consultant in Infectious Diseases, University Teaching Fellow, University of Edinburgh Two events of medical interest occurred during a recent visit to the Rocky Mountains and Colorado Springs. I developed gout in my left little toe within one week of arrival in Denver, the “mile high” city (5,280 feet) above sea level. […]
Collusion, illusion, or delusion?
Fending Off Death 1 by wiebkefesch on DeviantArt Doctors are – in the main – trained to prevent death. Modern medicine has made huge advances, and life expectancies continue to rise. However, there remains only one certainty in this life – that we are all going to die. Patients in the last year of life […]